Climate Deniers to Pope Francis: 'There Is No Global Warming Crisis'

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As Pope Francis prepares a historic document to make
environmental issues a priority for Catholics, a group of
climate-change deniers is trying to convince the pontiff this
week that global warming is nothing to worry about.

"Humans are not causing a climate crisis
on God's green Earth — in fact, they are fulfilling their
biblical duty to protect and use it for the benefit of humanity,"
Joseph Bast, president of the
Heartland Institute, said in a statement.

The group is sending a delegation to Rome this week to try to get
Pope Francis to pay attention to its position with events Monday
(April 27) and Tuesday (April 28). The Holy Father, meanwhile, is
hosting a workshop on global warming Tuesday at the Vatican,
which will include U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and Harvard
economist Jeffrey Sachs.

Pope Francis is drafting an encyclical (a papal letter that is
sent to bishops of all the Roman Catholic churches) in which he
is expected to declare that action on climate change is a moral
imperative for the 1.2 billion Catholics around the world. The
pope has been publicly speaking out on environmental issues over
the past several months.

"I don't know if it [human activity] is the only cause, but
mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the
face," the pope said, as quoted by the
Associated Press, during a trip to the Philippines. "We have,
in a sense, taken over nature."

The Heartland Institute's gripe with the pope might be emblematic
of the rift that's opened between Pope Francis and some
conservatives over hot-button issues in the culture wars. Last
fall, he told a gathering of scientists that the Big Bang
and evolution were
not incompatible with religion. Some conservative Catholic
groups were irked by the pope's more welcoming stance on gays and
lesbians in the Church after he told reporters in 2013, "If they
accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?"

Among scientists who study the climate, 97 percent agree that
humans are causing global warming, according to a 2013 study in
the journal
Environmental Research Letters. But among politicians,
lobbyists and the public, this consensus seems to disappear. A
recent investigation revealed that state environmental officials
in Florida were informally
banned from using the words "climate change" and "global
warming." A 2014 poll from the Yale Project on Climate Change
Communication found that 47 percent of Americans think global
warming is caused mostly by human activities, and 23 percent
don't think the climate is changing at all.